Beginning to “excavate” the ivory object in the conservation lab!

As you may recall, during the 2013 season, we found a very interesting ivory object (bowl? Lid?) in Area A. The object was taken out in the field in a complete block to be “excavated”, conserved and restored by Gali Beiner, in the conservation lab of the zooarchaeological department at HU.

Today, at long last, I brought the box with the ivory object (which had been stored in the interim by the IAA in a controlled environment) to the conservation lab, to begin the process of “excavation” in the lab.

This should take a week or so, and hopefully, I’ll have some more pictures as this moves along, but in the meantime, here are two pictures of the object, just after it was unwrapped and the very beginning of the “excavation”.

Needless to say, when we have a better idea what this thing is – I’ll update on that as well.